Article explores adoption of national nurse identifier system

Nursing and policy experts have called for a national nurse identifier system to record and track the contributions of nurses to patient care outcomes, and to understand the state of the nursing workforce. A Nursing Outlook article provides an overview of two existing national nurse identifiers ─ the National Provider Identifier and the National Council of State Boards of Nursing Identifier ─ and reviews three databases that are not nurse specific to learn lessons in the development of those databases. The article also explores the ethical, legal, social, diversity, equity and inclusion implications of adopting a unique nurse identifier. “Ensuring that the front-line nurses be involved can proactively help address and possibly resolve the ethical, legal and social implications of the unique nurse identifier,” writes lead author Garrett Chan, PhD, APRN, and his co-authors. “A unified system or network of systems needs to be a functional, unbiased repository of nurse data controlled by nursing.” Chan, an AONL member, is an associate adjunct professor in the school of nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, and president and CEO of HealthImpact in San Francisco. (Nursing Outlook article, 1/12/23)